Chapter Twenty-Five
Eleanor
My heart trembled as I looked at Hunter. All of the light and sound of the party around us disappeared and all I could focus on was him. I walked toward him, wanting to step into his arms, but he didn’t offer them.
“I heard that he was the best event rental and coordinator in the business,” I said. “I had to have him here for my opening celebration.”
“Opening celebration?” Hunter asked.
“Do you like it?” I asked, gesturing around us.
“What is this, Eleanor?”
“The night that you brought me up on the rocks to see the stars everything was so beautiful that I felt like I never wanted to leave. I wanted to be here on this island forever. To be with you forever. I found myself missing it so much that I did some research into it. I found out that it was owned by a family who had never even come to it. They had bought it up with some other land and largely forgot about it until I got in touch with them. So, I bought it from them and built this.”
“You called it Hunter’s Retreat.”
I nodded.
“When I was designing it, all I could think about were the things that you said when we were planning the shelter, both before and after the storm. I used as much as I could to create this.”
“Is there somewhere where we can talk?” he asked me.
I nodded again and gestured across the lobby toward the short hallway that led to my office. My heart lifted as we headed toward it. He wanted to talk to me alone. It was up a short set of stairs that allowed me to look out of the full wall of windows on one side at the waterfall a brief distance away. As soon as I had closed the door behind us, I started toward Hunter, wanting to close the space between us.
“What are you playing at, Eleanor?”
I fell back a step, stung by his words. I shook my head, already feeling tears starting to form in my eyes.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I’m not…”
“You said that you didn’t want to tell me who you were when we met because you didn’t want me to know about your money and form my opinions about you.”
“That’s true.”
“Please let me finish,” he said. “You didn’t want me to make any assumptions about you as a person, but you also didn’t want to give me the opportunity to take advantage of you because of your money. You thought that if I knew that you were who you are that all I would be able to see was dollar signs and then there would be a constant imbalance between us. But then you turn around and do this.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You can’t buy me, Eleanor. You lied to me about who you are and your money. You can’t turn around and try to use those things to make it all better.”
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Without another word, Hunter turned around and walked out of the office. The door closed behind him and I felt my knees buckle beneath me. I sat hard in the chair behind me, drawing in ragged breaths. This resort had been all that I thought about for months. It had been in every breath, in every beat of my heart. I wanted to show Hunter that I had listened to him, that I heard what he had said. He had been so overlooked throughout his life and so few people had taken the time to appreciate him and understand how amazing he really was. I could see the ache for that validation within him, and that is what I had wanted to give him.
But he had thrown it away. He had cast it to my feet, accusing me of the very thing that I had so desperately wanted to escape. Suddenly the sadness within me started to melt away. It drained out of me gradually, leaving my body as if it was sliding first from my mind, and then from my heart, dripping from my fingertips and sinking into the floor beneath me. In its place was frustration first, and then seething anger.
****
Hunter
I wanted to leave. I wanted to get off the island and go back to my real life. This is why I didn’t want to come here, but so much worse than I could have even planned for. I had wanted to burrow myself into reality and let all of this become one of those memories that faded into such abstract thought that eventually I would question if it had really happened.
Then I saw Eleanor.
Seeing her had been a stark shock of what reality really was for me now. In that moment, I knew that there was no way I was ever going to be able to put her behind me. I was never going to be able to see her as a distant, abstract memory. She was always going to be at the front of my mind, right there with me even as I went through each day without her.
I felt gutted as I rushed down the stairs from her office and back down into the party. The revelry around me felt out of place and I wanted to get out of it as fast as I could. As I made my way across the room toward the door, however, I felt a hand grasp my arm. I turned around and saw Snow looking at me imploringly.
“Please don’t go,” she said. “I don’t know what just happened up there. I don’t know what’s happening with all this at all. But I know that it means an incredible amount to Eleanor and to Noah. If you can’t stay here for her, please stay for him.” I pulled out of her hand and started toward the door again. “And you really don’t have a way to get off the island without us.” I stopped and felt my shoulders drop. “Feels pretty familiar, huh?”
Shit.
I turned back around slowly and gave Snow a tight-lipped smile. She walked up to me and wrapped her arm around my shoulders, giving me a little squeeze.
“Thank you, Hunter,” she said in a singsong voice that almost made me not want to poke her between the eyes.
Almost.
I wriggled out of her hold and started across the room toward my brother and the well-stocked bar that was set up beside him. Before I could get to him, though, Philip stepped away from his table and disappeared through a door at the back of the room. I sighed and grabbed a drink from the bar before dropping down into a chair at one of the tables set up around the open floor in the center of the room. I looked up and saw that the domed ceiling was glass, allowing me to see the stars overhead. My heart clenched.
“I have no idea what I’m drinking.”
I brought my attention down from the glass dome and saw Edwin settle into the chair beside me. He was holding a coconut filled with pink fluid and dotted with what looked like chunks of various fruits.
“I don’t either.”
He took a sip and nodded.
“Tastes good.”
I followed his gaze onto the dancefloor and saw that Sophie had built up more of a gathering for her conga line. She glanced over at her husband and slithered the line toward the table. I laughed as she performed a conga drive-by, snatching the drink from Edwin’s hand and leaning down to press a kiss to the top of his head.
“That woman,” he said, shaking his head.
“You really love her, don’t you?” I asked.
“So much that we had to move into international waters because it just might be illegal otherwise.”
I smiled at the sentiment.
“She’s certainly unique.”
Edwin nodded.
“Potentially another reason why we had to move into international waters.”
I laughed and slid the drink I hadn’t yet sipped across the table toward him.
“Well, after forty years together, at least you know all about her past.”
“Sixty-five years and ppppffffffff.”
I jumped slightly at the sound that he made by biting his bottom lip and blowing hard through his teeth.
“What?” I asked.
“I said ‘ppppffffffff,” he repeated. “You said that I know everything about Sophie’s past and I say a big old resounding ppppffffffff on that.”
“You don’t?”
“Of course not. What’s the point in that? Do I sometimes wonder how she made the ten thousand dollars that she brought home from Vegas the summer I had the ague that let us invest in our first company? Sure, I do. But when you’ve got the ague and your wife gallivants off, but then comes back, you don’t question the money that she brings with her. Or the glitter on her ass. Or the forged birth certificate in her luggage.”
“But doesn’t it bother you that she lied to you?”
Edwin looked at me for a quiet moment and for the first time I really saw the years in his eyes.
“Son, sometimes a person lies to you because they are really lying to themselves. You have to ask yourself if what they lied about really matters. Then you have to decide which is more important, the lie or the person.”